The full story...

United Nations urged to investigate Syria attack

TANYA NOLAN: There are growing calls for the United Nations to investigate claims about the use of chemical weapons in the civil war in Syria.

Both the government and the rebels blame each other for the apparent chemical attack in a town in Syria's north.

The US president Barack Obama says, if the use of chemical weapons is confirmed, it would be a "game changer" that would force the international community to act.

Ashley Hall reports.

ASHLEY HALL: Details about the attack are sketchy. Reports are filtering out of Syria, but little of the information they contain can be confirmed.

The activist Fadi Alkhankan works as a doctor at Marshall University in the United States.

He trained in Aleppo, and still has many friends working in hospitals there. They've told him they were swamped on Tuesday morning when a 'government' plane spread a chemical over the town of Khan al Assal - about 10 kilometres outside Aleppo,

FADI ALKHANKAN: Most of the cases came to Aleppo area and those number was exactly 531 cases.

ASHLEY HALL: And they shared similar symptoms.

FADI ALKHANKAN: The pupils were very small, the pupil in the eyes and most of them they were complaining of hypoxia and severe shortness of breath. A lot of cases required mechanical ventilation. There was no skin burn at all.

ASHLEY HALL: He says the symptoms seem to be contagious.

FADI ALKHANKAN: Even some of the doctors who get in contact with some of the cases got sick by just contacting the patients.

ASHLEY HALL: Are you able to tell from the symptoms what the cause was, what the agent was?

FADI ALKHANKAN: No, no one were able to confirm.

ASHLEY HALL: Fadi Alkhankan says three hospitals in Aleppo have closed their doors to new patients.

Those who made it inside are in a critical condition - 35 people are dead.

But he believes the death toll is much higher.

FADI ALKHANKAN: A lot of regime cars came and they pick up a lot of bodies from the streets and they left.

ASHLEY HALL: Where they went remains unclear.

So too, the origin of the weapon.

Syria's ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Ja'afari insists it didn't come from the government.

BASHAR JA'AFARI: The Syrian Government, if it has such weapons, will never use it against its own population.

ASHLEY HALL: The Assad regime wants the United Nations to appoint an independent technical mission to investigate.

It blames the rebels for the attack

Britain, France, and the US are also calling for a UN investigation.

The US president Barack Obama is talking tough.

BARACK OBAMA: I am deeply sceptical of any claim that in fact it was the opposition that used chemical weapons.

ASHLEY HALL: During his visit to Israel, Mr Obama said, if proven, the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government would be a "game changer" that would force the international community to act.

But in what way?

Steven Cook is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

STEVEN COOK: When the president says a game changer which is sort of a Washington DC beltway cliché, I think in this case he does mean it and I think that it would require a bigger international commitment to Syria then thus far anybody has discussed.

ASHLEY HALL: So we'd be talking about a fairly serious incursion into Syrian territory?

STEVEN COOK: Well, it certainly is a possibility.

ASHLEY HALL: Do you think the American people have the appetite for such an operation?

STEVEN COOK: Not at all. Anytime this has come up over the course of many months, the American people have signalled that they really have no appetite for another military intervention in the Middle East where this week recognising 10 years since the invasion of Iraq, most Americans looking back on it realise that that was a tragic error and they fear these kinds of foreign entanglements but as the president said, the use of chemical weapons does radically alter this situation and would change his calculations.

ASHLEY HALL: What's the chance that the allegation of use of chemical weapons is a strategic stunt, if you like, that one side, that the government is raising the prospect that the rebels are using them to justify the regime’s use of chemical weapons some time down the track and possibly worse chemical weapons.

STEVEN COOK: Oh, I would put nothing past the Assad regime. It could in fact be exactly what you're describing. A strategic kind of ruse in order to justify their own use of these weapons.

TANYA NOLAN: Steven Cook is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was speaking with Ashley Hall.

From the Archives

Sri Lanka is now taking stock of the country's 26-year-long civil war, in which the UN estimates as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians may have been killed. This report by the ABC's Alexander McLeod in 1983 looks at the origins of the conflict as it was just beginning.